Category Archives: Religion

Books, Religion

Raised Right: Repentance and Patriotism

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In chapter five of “Raised Right:  How I Untangled my Faith from Politics,” Alisa Harris shares her memories and thoughts from 9/11.  She speaks of it as a time of revived patriotism as well as a time when she hoped for a nation-wide revival and repentance.  Her link between patriotism and repentance struck me in this chapter.

While Harris might not have directly blamed 9/11 or any other disaster on QUILTBAG people, feminists, liberals, or any other perceived “enemies of God,” you can see the same mentality here.  While not (explicitly) pinpointing a particular group, she still thought of the national tragedy as god’s divine wrath and a warning call to repentance.

Harris explains that during the time immediately after 9/11, her mind began to compare America’s tragedy to the Old Testament description of the Israelites:

The world had shifted in a way I’d only read abut in the oldest of the Bible’s sacred books.  Although ancient Israel backslid, worshipped false gods, sacrificed its children, and neglected the tabernacle where God resided, God never abandoned His beloved.  Judgment came, the Israelites in their misery repented, and God always welcomed them back with a heart that forgave again and again.  I believed America, the new Israel, was stuck in the same relentless cycle: we backslid, sacrificed to the false gods of Hollywood and big government, murdered our children, and forsook the sacrifice of obedience;; but surely repentance and redemption and revival would come before it was too late.

What’s interesting to me — and something that she alludes to in other places — is that her list of America’s sins (or Israel’s for that matter) does not mention the neglect of the widow or orphan, taking advantage of those already impoverished and downtrodden.

At the time, Harris’s dream was of this leading to a revival.  She describes how she envisioned it:

I pictured revival beginning with a twenty-first century Jonathan Edwards in a small church in a tiny town waking up one day and being moved by God to preach an unusual message.  He would approach his pulpit that Sunday, look out at the soft sinners sitting in the pews, and then launch into a modern version of “Sinners of an Angry God” – a tale of woe, of damnation, of sinners being dangle over the mouth of hell by an outraged deity.  That same hand would clutch the hearts of the people who sat rapt in the pews.

I remember reading (or at least skimming) “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in high school.   It’s the model “fire and brimstone” sermon, and for good reason.  The fact that Harris and her former colleagues and co-religionists consider this sermon as the model for renewal and revival tells us a great deal about fundamentalist thought and the god they worship.

Understand that Harris is making it clear that in her early life, she soundly believed (and I suspect this is common amongst fundamentalists and other staunchly conservative Christians) is that revival and a return to God must be sparked by a fear of that same god and his almighty wrath.  Not can.  Not might.  Must.

This strikes me as an admission that the god of such people has nothing sufficiently positive or attractive with which to woo the wayward nonbeliever.[1]  Blessing will not woo the nonbeliever.[2]  Instead, they must be frightened into the grace of God by his wrathful judgment and doom.

Is it any wonder most of their evangelistic efforts fail?  There are reasons you don’t see more commercials that amount to “buy our product or we’ll beat you senseless.”

Of course, it’s important to note that Harris and those she worshipped with did not see 9/11 as a call for them to repent.  In their minds, that call was directed at others, which left those who were sending out that call on God’s behalf quite comfortable.

And that was her picture of patriotism at the time:  Telling others to shape up and get back in line.  I suspect that she might use a different term to describe that mentality now.  I certainly do.

Notes:
[1]  Remind me some day to do a post on why I despise the word nonbeliever.

[2]  Not surprising, since Jesus himself admits that God causes the sun to shine and the rain to shine on the righteous and the wicked alike.  Of course, I doubt most fundamentalists read that verse, and certainly not in context.  It’s a continuation of verse 44, which is the start of Jesus’s exhortation to love one’s enemies.  In context, verse 45 suggests that even God loves His enemies, which might conflict with all that wrath some of His followers is waiting for him to pour out.

Books, Memories, Meta-Blogging, Religion

Considering Peretti books for analysis

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After some thought, I’ve decided that I’m going to do a deconstruction — if you can still call it a deconstruction if you find more about the book that you like than you dislike — of another book by Frank Peretti.

I’ve read a total of five Peretti books.  Each one of them is slightly different in some way.  This Present Darkness is about the war between angels and demons as it plays out in a small town.  Piercing the Darkness, its sequel, is also about angels battling demons, but this time the main focus is the battle over a particular soul (though it did have a swipe at the public education system, which was a popular topic at the time I was reading it due tot he emergence of outcomes based education).

The third book that I read was Prophet, which was not about angels and demons but about a journalist who found himself living a “prophetic” (in the terms of warning others of the consequences of their misdeeds) vocation.  The book mostly focused on the evils of the (liberal, of course) media and abortion.

The fourth book that I read was The Oath.  It was a strange book in that it was far more a Horror book than the others.  While it got preachy about the nature of sin, there was also no clear connections to actual spiritual movements (at least not that I’m aware of) like the first three were.  I often joked that The Oath seemed more like Peretti contracted Stephen King to write a book for him in comparison to the others I had read.

I should note that I read these four books when I was in high school, when I still considered myself a fundamentalist Christian.  As such, I read them as a member of Peretti’s target audience.

I didn’t read my fifth book, The Visitation until I was in my late twenties or early thirties, long after I became a witch and devotee of Freyja.  In many ways, I suppose that’s why i liked the book.  In this book, Peretti turned his critical eye away from “outsiders” and turned it upon his own religious subculture.  As a former member of that same subculture, I appreciated his look.

I’ve decided that I want to do an in-depth analysis of The Visitation.  As I said, I’m not sure I can call it a deconstruction, as many of the parts that I will be exploring are places where I actually identify and agree with Peretti’s thoughts.  However, given the nature of the main plot, which I wasn’t as impressed with, I don’t expect my comments to be entirely glowing, either.

I’m also hoping that it might be interesting to compare this book with This Present Darkness.  Who knows, maybe it’ll even spark up some sort of discussion between Yamikuronue and myself as we compare our experiences of our respective Peretti books.

Religion, Society

Fundamentalists and Psychology: Faith isn’t enough?

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Continuing the theme of my previous post, I think that there is another important reason why fundamentalist Christians are anti-psychology and particularly anti-psychotherapy (by which I mean any form of mental health counseling).  This other reason is touched upon by Total Life Ministries’s vignette, “The Seduction of Psychology.”  The author explains:

It’s practitioners believe that the word of God by itself is inadequate. So they presume to integrate God’s Word with humanistic, atheistic psychology. What results is supposedly Christianized therapies. But these therapies diminish the Lord Jesus Christ while exalting man. Many Christians are being led astray by these seductive therapies–which amount to a new gospel that heals their brokenness superficially (Jeremiah 8:11).

While those behind TLM choose to focus on the idea that psychology is extra-Biblical, thereby suggesting a tendency towards what many have come to refer to as bibliolatry, I think the idea can be spread to a belief that psychology is extra-theological (as evidenced by TLM’s constant reminder that many leading psychologists have been and are atheists).  To put it short, they see psychology as not only suggesting that the Bible is insufficient for mental health, but that Jesus and God aren’t sufficient.

While not all fundamentalists are proponents of the prosperity gospel to the same degree as people like Oral Roberts and Ken Hagin, there’s a certain kernel of that mentality in most fundamentalists, most notably when it comes to people’s emotional well-being.  There is this strong sense in most fundamentalist communities that a faith in Jesus should lead to peace of mind, happiness, contentment,[1] and joy.  Indeed, if you express concerns for your state of mind in fundamentalist circles, you are most likely to be told to “have more faith,” “pray more,” or “hand it over to Jesus.”

So ultimately, seeking out the help of a mental health professional for a problem is saying that “faith in Jesus” isn’t enough.  It’s saying that you can’t “pray away” your problems, be it depression, marital troubles, an addiction or compulsion, or something else. It’s suggestion that “His grace is not sufficient for you” after all.

Psychology’s suggestion that it might have something to offer that might help in ways that “praying harder” and “having more faith” cannot is a direct attack to fundamentalist theology.

Notes:
[1]  Of course, this idea is further strengthened by the cherry-picking of verses like Philippians 4:11.

Religion

Fundamenetalists, Selfishness, and Psychology

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One of the interesting things about fundamentalist Christianity is that it often looks upon modern psychology with suspicion and mistrust.  At the extreme, you have many people in the “spiritual warfare” movement that believe psychology is downright demonic, as demonstrated by a scene in “This Present Darkness,” where the demons are found gathered in the building that houses Whitmore College’s psychology department.  I myself underscored this during a comments discussion at Confessions of a Former Conservative:

But bear in mind,t hose “experts” rely on psychology, which is considered highly suspect as “secularist philosophy” in spiritual warfare crowds. In many of these people’s minds, psychologists are opening them up to demons as much as a group of teens with a ouija board.

Even those fundamentalists who don’t go looking for demons behind every bush are highly skeptical of psychology, considering it “pointless mumbo jumbo” at best.[1]  So why is this?  Is it simply a matter of fundamentalists’ suspicion of science in general?  I think that contributes to it, but I think there are a couple of other factors worthy of note.

For this blog post, I want to focus on fundamentalist Christianity’s extreme focus on self-denial and a common perception of psychology — especially psychological counseling — as being a selfish pursuit.

Growing up in a fundamentalist church, I learned the key to J-O-Y:  Jesus, others, and you.  Sometime in elementary school — perhaps even preschool — I learned this little formula of the order of importance of everything in the universe and was told that following it would bring me joy.  If I just put Jesus first, then everyone else around me, and only thought of myself at the very end, I would be a good little Christian and would be blessed by this.

In many ways, psychology — especially those areas of psychology and psychiatry that focus on helping people overcome their problems — turns this whole meme on its head.  Psychology is the exploration of one’s own thoughts, and very psyche.  In terms of counseling, one sits with a therapist and looks over one’s life and ones problems,[2] trying to make sense of it and figure out how to change things to either overcome a problem, learn to better cope with it, or just heal from past hurts so one can move on with ones life.  A session of therapy is quite self-centered.  To a mode of religious thought that believes that everything and everyone else must come first no matter what, this makes psychology downright horrible.

It’s no wonder that such Christians would see psychiatry as a sure gateway to demonic influence.

Notes:
[1]  For the more daring reader, some “interesting” alternatives to psychological counseling can be find by doing an online search for “Bible based counseling.”  However, be forewarned that while you will find some interesting pages of honest people trying to integrate their faith in sound, science-based therapeutic techniques, you will also find a lot about deliverance, victim-blaming, victim-shaming, and some of the worst aspects of the darker side of the so-called Prosperity Gospel.

[2]  In stricter fundamentalist circles, even acknowledging that one has problems is often considered a great sin or weakness.  Of course, that’s getting into a subject of a future blog post.

Around The Blogosphere, Books, Religion

Great deconstruction

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I’ve been fascinated by Fred Clark’s deconstruction of the Left Behind series since I first came into contact with it.  It’s one of the reasons I’ve been reviewing Alisa Harris’s book chapter by chapter.  I have also been considering tackling a more thorough reconstruction of another book.  The book that kept coming back to me was Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness, which I originally read while I was in late elementary school (approximately fifth or sixth grade).

While This Present Darkness is nearly three decades old, I think it’s still relevant in that it has shaped and still expresses many of the ideas central to those Christians who are members of the spiritual warfare movement.  As I spent time involved in that movement, attacking this book made a lot of sense.

Yesterday, however, I discovered that a fellow Slacktivite, a woman who goes by the name of yamikuronue on her blog, began deconstructing Peretti’s book back in September.  I read through the entirety of her deconstruction so far (thankfully, she’s only fifty pages into it) and found it to be fascinating and remarkable.

From what I’ve gathered reading yamikuronue’s blog, she was never a member of the spiritual warfare movement herself.  In many ways, I think this is proving to be an asset to her deconstruction.  I’ve looked at a lot of things that she covers and realized that I probably would have taken them for granted and glossed over them.  To give you an example of that, consider the following excerpt from her post dated 22 October:

The man has serious issues with anger management and victim-blaming;
why complacency as his major sin? Complacency goes with despair
certainly – “I can’t fix anything, so why bother” – but that means the
entire bit of irrational anger was all his own doing, with absolutely no
infernal aid. Marshall is an abusive man without the demonic
intervention; all the demon was doing was encouraging him to stop trying
to be less abusive. And this is meant to be our hero?

Understanding how spiritual warfare types often see anger, I would have glossed over this excellent point, whereas yamikuronue focuses on it quite well.  As such, I think she is doing a far better job at deconstructing the books than I would have.

So instead of doing my own deconstruction, I’m going to follow along with hers and offer my comments.  I still have a lot to offer, such as how the things she is deconstructing ties into the greater spiritual warfare mindset and the community that subscribes to it.  I would encourage my readers to follow along as  well.

And I’ll find another book to tackle when the time comes.

Books, Politics, Religion

Raised Right: Idolizing mortals

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In chapter four of Raised Right:  How I Untangle my Faith from Politics, Alisa Harris talks about her childhood obsession with and idolization of Ronald Reagan.  Of course, Harris’s obsession with Reagan was not limited to herself.  She describes the phenomenon among conservative evangelicals as follows:

Some children revere saints.  In the conservative circles of my childhood, we had heroes — not suffering martyrs who sacrificed for their faith but conquerors who crushed the enemies of God with truth and justice.  These conquerors had to be Christians, preferably of humble roots and always of stainless character, who overcame their enemies to accomplish deeds that changed the world.  We read glowing heroic accounts that omitted Thomas Jefferson’s deism, Louisa May Alcott’s transcendentalism, and Christopher Columbus’s avarice.

Harris’s comparison between the martyrs idolized by other Christians and the “conquerors” of some conservatives is well worth noting, as both the Bible and Jesus[1] seem pretty obvious supporters of the former model rather than the latter.  Without explicitly doing so, Harris seems to at least imply that this conqueror-veneration represents a deviation from more traditional Christian philosophy.  This is further strengthened when she describes her rather curious re-interpretation of Jesus’s words in Luke 4:18 at that time in her life:

When I heard “freedom,” I thought “deregulation of onerous government rules”; when I heard “bind,” I thought “bind to the virtue of limited government”; when I heard “oppressed,” I thought of children who were not allowed to pray in school and successful rich people whose money was seized by the government.  I would whisper, “It is for freedom that Christ set us free,” and would think, Freedom to display the Ten Commandments in a public place!

It’s also noteworthy that Harris’s heroes — and the heroes of those around her — had to be whitewashed to appear blameless and perfect in order to be accept.  Conservative heroes could not and cannot be “sinners bought by grace,” but at least had to be practically sinless.[2]  She gives the example of Irving Berlin, who made her uncomfortable with his “coarse jesting” about having sex on his honeymoon.[3]

I suppose this explains why conservative Christians are so slow to acknowledge when their great leaders “fall” in scandals.  They’ve allowed themselves to build up this idea that they are heroes and so perfect — something necessary to consider them great leaders — that acknowledging those instances where their leaders reveal their “feet of clay” and falter means admitting that they invested in the wrong person.  In a sense, their leaders’ failings are echoed in their own failings in “backing the wrong person.”

Harris closes out the chapter in describing her time at a Decemberists concert after Obama’s election victory.  She describes the crowd cheering on Obama’s success and his promises of change, being encouraged and whipped up by the musicians on stage.  Harris compares this Obamamania to her childhood idolization of Reagan.  I’m inclined to disagree with Harris’s comparison here, or at least as universal as she seems to paint it.  While I have no doubt that some liberals got caught up in a blind belief in Obama — and are possibly still caught up in it — most of my fellow liberals were and are well aware that Obama is just another human being, as mistake-prone and imperfect as any of us.  In my experience, liberals are able to be both supportive of our leaders and critical of them at the same time.

Notes:
[1]  The post-millennial dispensationalist version of “Turbo-Jesus” notwithstanding.

[2]  Of course, I suspect this was only true for certain values of “sin.”  For example, it doesn’t seem that conservatives were or are that concerned with whether their heroes show any signs of that great abomination, pride.

[3]  The conservative Christian treatment of sex, even when it’s in the “sacred confines of marriage,” deserves its own blog post.  Perhaps several.  I will note, however, that Harris lists Berlin’s jokes about sex with his new bride was mentioned even before the fact that he was Jewish rather than Christian, suggesting that the former was a more troubling matter than the latter.

Paganism, Religion

Pagans, Wiccans, psychics, and jargon

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Pentagram with a circle around it

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Emilyperson left a great comment on Friday’s post:

I’m curious, when you first started hanging around Pagans, was there a lot of jargon that confused your young Christian self? I wouldn’t expect you to have been familiar with things like different deities, symbols, and procedures, but does the slang tend to be as far from mainstream American slang as the fundamentalists’?

To be honest, I can’t say as I recall much about my early exposure to Paganism.  It would be hard for me to evaluate how I handled the introduction to Pagan, Wiccan, and psychic concepts and terminology thirteen years ago.  So rather than trying to remember, I’m going to just take a look at how I perceive such jargon now, how it relates to Wicca, Paganism, and psychic phenomena/practices, and try to guess how an “outsider” or “newbie” might perceive and experience an encounter with such terminology.[1]

I think that Pagan, Wiccan, and psychic jargon can be just as offbeat and unusual as fundamentalist Christian jargon.  And to be frank, there is a lot of it, due to the great diversity of practices and beliefs that falls under those collective umbrellas (each one is pretty broad and contains great diversity in its own right).

However, I also think that the jargon isn’t quite as central to the Pagan/Wiccan/psychic identities.  You can learn a lot about all of those things without coming into contact with terms like “chakras,” “arcana,” “ardanes,” and “visualization.”  You can learn a lot of the basics and get a lot of information before delving into such technical, specialized terms.

Compare this to fundamentalist and even evangelical Christianity, where the first step involves being “born again,” which is a jargon-y term.  In reality, I think fundamentalist jargon and one’s knowledge of it is often used as part of the fundamentalist identity and a way to prove oneself part of the “in crowd.”

This brings me up to my second point, in which I think the religio-magical movements I’m now a part of tend to be far better at presenting our jargon to “outsiders” in an accessible way.  This is done both through personal conversations and the constantly growing introductory literature available.

I think this can at least partly be attributed to the fact that these are relatively new movements and that many of the adherents are still converts rather than people who were raised by Pagan parents[2].  As such, they are religious movements that are more geared towards welcoming new members and making everything understandable and accessible, even to the point of often anticipating what terms may be unfamiliar to the “uninitiated.”

Fundamentalists, on the other hand, tend to be more insular and seem to just expect everyone to automatically know what it means to be “born again,” “sanctified,” or “demonically oppressed.”

Notes:
[1]  It would be awesome if any “newbies” and “outsiders” would pipe up in comments and offer their thoughts.

[2]  This certainly isn’t universal.  I do know a growing number of second-generation Pagans and a few third-generation Pagans.  However, I think we converts outnumber them considerably.

Memories, Religion

Fundamentalism and Jargon

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This past Monday, The Former Conservative wrote a post critiquing a Rapture Ready conversation in which some people suggested that both mental illness and addiction were actually a matter of demonic oppression.  FC mentioned in passing that he had never heard the phrase “demonic oppression” before.

This surprised me for a moment.  As a former fundamentalist who had gotten involved in the spiritual warfare movement, I was all too familiar with phrase, but what it meant and why it was coined as a phrase to represent something distinct from demon possession.  The idea that other Christians were completely unfamiliar with the term surprised me, even thirteen years after I left that particular subculture.

Any group — whether you’re talking fundamentalists, more liberal Christians, or even video game players — tends to develop their own jargon, words and phrases that are not familiar to those outside of the group.  This can create communication issues with those outside the group when discussing certain topics, though it’s an issue that’s normally easy overcome.

I think this can be somewhat harder for fundamentalists and even more conservative evangelicals, however.  As I mentioned in a guest-blogging post over at CoaFC, fundamentalist identity tends to consume and isolate its adherents to a near-absolute degree.  It occurs to me that another consequence of this process is that fundamentalists can become quite oblivious to their jargon and how peculiar it is to their group.  Effectively, they’re so invested in and surrounded by their subculture, that the idea that anyone might not even be aware of their specialized terms doesn’t occur to them.

I’ve been a witch for thirteen years now, and I’ve met people who were not raised with my background.  Intellectually I know that there are people who never had a reason to hear terms like “demonic possession” and “blood bought.”  And yet, it’s easy to fall back into old thinking patterns just enough that an instance where I’m reminding of that fact catches me by surprise, however slight that surprise might be.  I think that says something.

Books, Religion

Raised Right: Argument Without Engagement

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In chapter three of Raised Right, Alisa Harris explores the confrontational approach  to both politics and evangelism she was taught in her youth:

Like Socrates I was a gadfly – always provoking, stinging citizens out of complacency, and melodramatically drinking the hemlock they forced on me in punishment.

I remember this mentality growing up.  The idea of remaining silent on any issue deemed important by certain Christian leaders was unthinkable.  The evil of the day — abortion, homosexuality, moral relativism, and the New Age movement all had to be soundly and unequivocally renounced at every opportunity.  (And sometimes, like Harris’s description of the county fair, it was up to us to create such an opportunity.)

And like Harris, I remember how those people who took issue with the heavy-handed tactics I learned were to be considered proof that I was doing the right thing.  After all, the BIble said that those of us who followed Jesus were sure to offend people.  So I had the perfect excuse to see reasonable criticism of my aggressive posture as mere rejection of the Truth I was proclaiming.[1]  In effect, I was set up to be obnoxious and see myself as a martyr.

Harris goes on to talk about the Four Killer questions that one of her evangelism mentors taught her and her peers to use:

  • What do you mean by that?
  • How do you know what you are saying is true?
  • What difference does it make in your life?
  • What if you are wrong and you die?

These were not questions I was taught to use.  I was taught standard arguments to use on different topics and techniques to force the conversation along a certain path.  Both approaches are based on the idea that what the evangelistic or political target actually thinks or believes isn’t important as in forcing the conversation int he direction you want it to go.

Harris describes the superbly beautiful way in which the Four Killer Questions not only accomplish their goal, but make themselves the ultimate universal approach to winning any argument:

This approach didn’t require you to refute, or even know, the tenets of Marxism or socialism or secular humanism because you strictly limited your conversation to asking these four simple questions again and again. If the Marxist responded with the same questions, you shot back, “What kind of evidence would you accept as proof?”  Since wed learned that his objections weren’t serious or even intellectually honest, that they were grounded in nothing but a stubborn blindness to truth, the Marxist could give just one honest answer:  “None.”

Of course, anyone who has been on the receiving end of the Four Killer Questions[2] or similar debate tactics could tell you, the most likely reaction to being thus heckled[3] is frustration, anger, and returned hostility rather than conversion.  In addition to the promise of “martyrdom for truth,” Harris’s mentors offered the perfect way to assuage any concerns about the ineffectiveness of the approach:

The Four Killer Questions brought the godless to Christ – later.  Those Four Killer Questions would gnaw away at the girl from Planned Parenthood or the guy with the dreads, eroding their faith in their worldview until someone else dropped along with the gospel message…

This is a convenient out, as it allows the person to imagine the “effectiveness” of their obnoxious behavior appearing out of their own sight, beyond their ability to objectively – or even subjectively – measure them.  In a way, it creates a fantasy where one’s “evangelistic efforts” are completely detached from not only the people being evangelized, but from any sort of results.

I’ve occasionally commented on the Former Conservative’s posts criticizing some evangelists’ approaches pointing out that “saving souls” is not nearly as important as “preaching the message” and that to such people, “evangelism” is an act of piety rather than an honest attempt at persuasion.  I think that in this chapter, Harris demonstrates not only the truth of that statement, but the ways in which such evangelicals rationalize the transition from the latter intuit the former, or at least the conflation of the two.

Notes:
[1]  In fairness, some evangelicals do try to combat this notion.  For example, in college, the volunteer staffworker that InterVarsity Christian Fellowship assigned to my campus’s chapter often said, “The Bible may offend some, but that’s no excuse for presenting its message offensively.”  This isn’t to say her presentation of Biblical truth was always the best it could be, but at least she tried to make it clear that “being as harsh as possible as long as you’re convinced you’re right” was not an acceptable approach.

[2]  Harris provides a perfect anecdote that shows what I imagine would be a fairly typical reaction.

[3]  I think this is a far proper term to describe the intent and effects of this approach rather than “challenged” or “debated.”  Both of those terms suggest actual engagement with the substance of one’s positions.

Paganism, Religion, Witchcraft

On Mediumship

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Sunday evening, I went to Wegman’s to pick up a salad for Monday’s lunch as well as sodas and snacks for the week.  Derek, the cashier who rang me up, inquired about where I had my face painted (I was done up like Tigger), and I told him it was at the annual psychic fair at Psychic’s Thyme.  He asked me about that and then asked if I believed in ghosts.  I simply smiled and said, “Well, I sorta have to, seeing as I’m a medium.”  I think that answer rather surprised him, as he started babbling a bit.  He mostly started talking about the “Paranormal Activity” movies.

This is something I’ve noticed with some people.  While they are fascinated by movies and tales of the paranormal, they really get uncomfortable around those of us who are (or claim to be, if my more skeptical readers prefer) “the real deal.”  I’m not sure whether it’s because they find the idea of spirits frightening[1] and therefore find a spooky, controllable fantasy more appealing than if they were to consider it a reality they do not understand.  Or maybe it’s for some other reason.

Of course, in reality, communicating with spirits isn’t nearly as interesting or titillating as the stuff they put in Paranormal Activity or similar movies.  In a lot of ways, spirit communication is quite ordinary and unremarkable.  Granted, it’s touching in its own way, but in a very different way than the normal thrills.

Spirit communication is ultimately about connection with our greater spiritual comity.  In Saturday’s post, I spoke of the ancestors as a source of wisdom and the creators of the world we inherited.  Spirit communication is an opportunity to connect with those predecessors — though more recently passed loved ones are the most likely to connect with us this way and maintain that sense of continuity and community.  It’s a way to remember them, honor them, and learn just a bit more from them.

But then, I’m not sure everyone values that the same.

Notes:
[1]  To be honest, I’m more inclined to find them annoying, especially on those occasions where they show up in every day life.  After about the third time I look behind myself to see if the presence I’m feeling is connected to a physical body in a public space, I start to worry that the other people are starting to think I’m weird.[2]

[2]  In fairness, they’d be right…